soul untethered
by stramonium
Summary: The first time he saw her in Midgar, she was buying bandages and bottles of hydrogen peroxide.


"Thank you for everything, sir."

The woman dropped the gil notes into his outstretched hand. He shoved them haphazardly into his pocket; wallets were a liability.

"No thanks necessary. It was just a job."

The woman shook her head. "Don't think so lightly of your own life. We'll be in touch if we need your services again."

She walked away from their meeting spot then, her thin black hair fluttering in the light breeze. He reached back into his pocket. This would be enough to last him the next two weeks. She wasn't one to shortchange him.

He made his way to the general store in the far corner of Sector 7, far enough that one could reach out their hand and feel a few drops of rain sluicing down from the upper plates. The weathered copper bell chirped above him as he opened the door, signaling his arrival to the proprietor. Cloud liked this place despite its inconvenience. The owner never asked questions and feigned ignorance when Shinra showed their faces, sniffing out the burning scent of dissent.

Mindlessly, he gathered freeze dried fruit and instant noodles. His eyes wandered toward the stand of prohibitively expensive vegetables. He never thought cucumbers would be so hard to come by. Those weren't things country boys considered when they dreamt of leaving.

The bell chimed once more.

* * *

_The first time I saw you in Midgar, you were buying bandages and bottles of hydrogen peroxide. Your back was turned to me, but I knew instantly. You stared at the wooden floor and slid a stack of crumpled bills across the counter, seeming ashamed. A stream of blood snaked down the back of your leg, pooling at the edge of your boot. I didn't try to hide and you never tried to look. You walked out of the store and waded into the holy bath of blue light that shone from above. I realized then that I didn't hide because I had wanted you to look — to see me, for no one else could._

* * *

The sight anchored itself to the crevices of his cortex long after she left. As he dragged himself from job to job, slum to slum, thoughts of her intertwined themselves with the dense fog that clouded the rest of his mind.

Mud caked his boots on the path to the train. The mephitic smell of formaldehyde choked the little remaining life out of the recycled air. It would take a long time before anyone got down there to drain the spill, if anyone indeed came down at all.

A group of people was clustered around the streetlamp, casually conspiring with one another. He wasn't oblivious to the various flavors of rebellion that the slums had to offer. He kept polite distance and gradually moved toward the western wall. His history meant that he couldn't afford to get entangled in their enterprises.

He was nonetheless curious and sneaked furtive glances at the group. One was a towering man with a machine gun in place of a hand. Cloud scowled. Not someone who should have been acting shady out in the open, even at this hour when the transit guards were barely able to keep their heads up. There were two women, one with auburn hair tied into a long tail and the other — a familiar face.

His heart lurched to a stop and his instincts insisted that he hide, but nothing could cover him. Even if there was, he'd appear more suspicious than them. Cloud kept walking, even as his eyes lingered on her. She was facing the man but her profile was visible. She covered her mouth with a gloved hand, eyebrows knitting together in concern.

He stopped at the steps leading up to the train and let loose a deep sigh. The sole guard on duty quirked a brow but said nothing. She was long out of his line of vision now. He dragged his feet up the stairs and waited behind a signboard on the platform. He couldn't see her — now she couldn't see him either.

The train came speeding by, sending his hair aflutter and coming to a halt with a bloodcurdling screech. The lights were dim inside the cars and he could see his indistinct reflection in the windows. For an unsettling moment, he thought he could see her right beside him.

The doors opened and he crossed the threshold.

* * *

_Your face was everywhere, but I never saw the smile that I sought. I eventually realized what had happened. That smile died in the fire, but you carried its ashes in an urn. A sliver of that joy clung to you like sandspur, sinking its spines into your heart and reminding you of what you lost. I could never know how you truly felt; you were so far away. I could only color in the gaps where your emotions would have been with my own dull palette._

* * *

The world beyond that derelict room grew increasingly intimidating. It was cruel, crawling with people too beaten down to care. There was no reason to leave but to buy essentials and pay his paltry rent. Besides, the more he went out, the more he risked running into her and opening up that painful Pandora's box.

The vivid purple light of a billboard flooded the otherwise black room. He rolled languidly off the bed and stood up to pluck a bag of freeze dried strawberries off the top of the minifridge. They melted on his tongue, flavorless, but that's how everything tasted those days. He wandered toward the window and peered down at the people below, weaving their way through the streets and no doubt acutely aware of the inconsequentiality of their lives.

His stomach flipped when he spotted her amongst the crowd. The sight of her always induced those visceral reactions, physical symptoms of an unidentified disease. He could never pinpoint whether the source was shame or something else.

She wandered into a bar called Seventh Heaven. He pressed his lips into a thin line even as his heart stuttered beneath his ribs. If he were to go a different day, would she still be there?

He turned away from the window, disgusted. The gravity of his own selfishness threatened to break him at times like these. He retreated back into the bed and fumbled for the remote, turning the television on and letting the white noise of Shinra-approved programming usher him away from all hope.

* * *

_I was tied to my bed by the tethers of my mind. Your face flashed on the television screen and the electronic billboards, still without the smile for which I desperately searched. I couldn't escape, but I didn't want to. Guilt whispered in my ear and burrowed into my chest. We would live and die in this indifferent city without having ever crossed paths again. Only your ghost would keep me company. If the real you saw me like that, I would have let the earth swallow me whole. I wanted you to think of the real me as dead. The Cloud that lived in your memories was the one worth protecting._

* * *

He jolted up in bed, gasping thirstily for air. One half of the room was cloaked in swarthy shadows — the other stained a shade of royal blue that only served to agitate his anxiety. The bright purple advertisement was gone, it seemed, supplanted by something else equally inane.

Cloud threw the sheets off of him and ran his hands through his hair. Sections of it clung to the sweat lining his forehead. The nightmares never ceased and he wondered if they plagued her too. If their dreams were always so similar, their nightmares must have been as well. He would never know so long as he ensconced himself in cowardice.

He had made his choice. Determination swelled in his chest.

The next day, the rusting elevator finally succumbed. He had to take the stairs.

* * *

_The last time I saw you in Midgar, I walked into Seventh Heaven and ordered a whiskey sour. I wanted to make you laugh, but you only braced yourself against the bar and cried until you were rung dry. You didn't even think to mock me as I thought you would. I stood there, not knowing what to do or how to console you. My courage waned as quickly as it had waxed._

* * *

He stood there, rendered helpless by the onslaught of her sorrow.

"I knew you'd come back," she said once she had collected herself. She wiped the remnants of her tears on the back of her hand. The drops glistened in the fluorescent light, splintering into a prism of violet, yellow, and red.

"That makes one of us, then," he said softly. He scratched the back of his head, suddenly aware of how real this was. "Anyway, about that whiskey sour…"

Her head jerked up. Her eyes were swollen and red-rimmed, but she smiled wryly. "Right."

She strode over to the back where bottles lined the mirrored wall and set about fulfilling his request.

"You're part of some anti-Shinra group, aren't you?" he asked, keeping his voice low.

She paused, hand hovering above the bottle of lemon juice. Her eyes darted over to him and she matched his volume. "I won't comment on that."

He shrugged noncommittally and she returned to her duties. The silence between them was still comfortable after so many years — like slipping under an old comforter soaked in the scent of one's childhood home. When she turned around to slide the glass in his direction, flames of moxie flickered in her eyes.

"Join us," she begged. "We're just a ragtag team right now. I don't know how much we'll be able to get done on our own, but with you here…"

Cloud stared into the murky yellow of the whiskey sour, halfheartedly hoping that it would give him an answer to such a weighty question. The liquid swirled around in the cup and he saw his life bifurcate before his eyes. One branch featured her, however ill-fated it might have been. The other was marked by her absence in exchange for security. He gnawed his lip. He already lived so long in fear.

"I can't do that. I'm already on Shinra's radar. They'll come after you guys twice as fast if I show my face around you."

Her face fell in disappointment. She frowned and looked down at the lacquered countertop. He could see the ghost of a blush tinting her cheeks.

"Right. I understand," she said. "I can't force you."

She quickly remembered herself, though, and held her head up. The desperation in her gaze burned holes through his heart and dragged his guilt to the surface where it thrashed and throbbed in protest of being seen.

"But don't be a stranger. Please. I thought — I really thought you were never coming back."

First, she knew he was going to come back, but then the truth revealed itself, as it always did with her.

Her glossy lips broke into a beam and his muscles locked him in place. Even the most ambitious individual never truly knows how to act when they've found what they've been looking for. She rested her hand, cool and clad in leather, on top of his.

"I'm happy, Cloud. It's been a long time since I was this happy."

He brought the glass to his mouth. The ethanol burned his nostrils, but the lemon juice was sweet against his lips. The lights of the surrounding businesses went out, one by one, but the all-enveloping veil of time spared the bar — as though it knew what was to come. Time waited for them to bid farewells they didn't know they needed to say.

* * *

_The last time I truly saw you, you were falling from a Mako Reactor far above the slums. Your limbs were limp, dangling freely in the air as gravity coaxed you towards the earth. The sight was on every television station, every billboard. Cameras followed you with voyeuristic delight as you descended; I understood more than ever what you had been fighting for. Yet, I watched. I watched you plummet toward your end, knowing in that brutal moment that I had made the costliest mistake in rejecting your pleas. When the lens zoomed in on your face, your eyes were closed, and on your lips, that precious smile — as dazzling as stardust, and just as ephemeral._


End file.
